John Wyndham – Mallaband-Brown

I asked this on Threads and mentioned my favourites. The Chrysalids, the Day of the Triffids the Midwich Cuckoos, Chocky, The Trouble with Lichen and the Kraken Wakes were the ones I read.

I know he wrote other short stories, and some of the main novels were turned into films, but they never quite came up to the standards of the original books. Some of them were turned into TV series too.

Reading Wyndham got me into science fiction and I found I loved others too, like Issac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, and Ursula K LeGuin.

Wyndhams style could be chilling, he sets up situations that can trap people and his descriptions are sometimes very macabre. I had the pleasure of reading them in the 1970s, once I’d read one I had to read more.

I don’t do book reviews, but I’ve started rereading ‘the Kraken Wakes’ by John Wyndham.

It’s not the most comfortable book to read in the midst of a global pandemic, and like his better known book ‘the day of the Triffids’, it is the story of an alien invasion of global proportions.

The book was written several decades ago when the threat from communism and the Cold War was at its height. Part of the story is the arguments between the west and the east and them blaming each other for losses of ships over deep ocean trenches.

The narrator and his wife are involved from the start, seeing fireballs hit the sea during their trip on a cruise ship.

It continues in three phases, one two and three, that gradually describe what happens as the invasion continues. Some of the language and attitudes are old fashioned because of the age when the book was written. But the book builds tension gradually and as I’m about half way I don’t know how it will turn out.

If you want to read an interesting sci- fi book have a look. There are others including the ‘Midwich Cuckoos’ and ‘The Trouble with Lichen’ that Wyndham wrote.

Mallaband-Brown

Tag: John Wyndham

Have you read books by John Wyndham?

The Kraken Wakes